Week 4
It’s been a good week! I’m feeling inspired.
I’ve noticed there’s a level of excitement that comes from researching a subject for my assignments and finding people have written at length about it, when it’s either something I’m passionate about, or something I can relate back to my work in a somewhat obscure way. The research for this week’s assignment resulted in finding a dissertation titled “Metal Machine Music: Technology, Noise, and Modernism in Industrial Music 1975–1996”, which is incredibly detailed, and I’m sure I’ll be able to cite it in many of my future texts, as I’m obviously very influenced by all kinds of industrial music.
Tuesday was a presentation and constructive criticism session, where we showed off our pieces for assignment 2.1. I received some positive comments about the tightness of my synchresis, which I was happy to hear. Constructive criticism was useful and valid, describing a need to ramp up the stakes a little, and to play with space to even more of an extreme than I attempted already. Injecting more variation into the piece could also assist with engagement, either through layering or simply variation in sound sources. Lately I’ve been somewhat obsessed with having everything sound like it’s being generated by one object, even if the context doesn’t call for it.
Friday was mostly a session mostly dedicated to watching and analysing two visual pieces—Brothers Quay’s In Absentia, which I hadn’t heard of before, and Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected, which I had seen before. Despite this, I wrote a fairly large amount of notes.
I had no idea that Brothers Quay had also directed the video for Peter Gabriel’s song Sledgehammer, which is surprising because I’m a huge Peter Gabriel fan. Anyway, In Absentia, in contrast, is a very different mood, especially when accompanied by the Stockhausen soundtrack; it’s quite unsettling. I learned a lot about how to create such unsettling environments in audio, particularly through use of deliberately inconsistent/incomplete synchresis (cf. Darrin pointing out that a window swings six times, but only the first four being articulated with sound).
Analysing Rejected was a pretty fun exercise. It’s such an absurd collection of animations that I’d never really paid super close attention to the sound, but having a deeper look at it reveals even further absurdity due to the choices made. A key takeaway, even if simple, was the idea that the use of birds can subtly/subliminally open up a space. This is something I’d never even thought of before.
I’d also never really thought about comedic audio before, and positively, have come away from that session with some interesting ideas about how to accentuate or even create humour with audio. One example from Rejected which stood out was the perspective cuts of the screams from the “Fat and Sassy” animation. They were not only cut in such a way that you can only hear the person on-screen, but it also sounds like the screams are starting at each cut, making it seem like each person is taking turns screaming. This just makes it even more absurd to me!
I decided on a more “music video” approach for assignment 2.2. I wanted to make something heavy, and went with the obvious choice of making something similar to Autechre’s Second Bad Vilbel, given the visuals created by Chris Cunningham had some similarity to the robot entity in the visual work I chose. I took some inspiration from SOPHIE and Gridlock as well, the former being a rather recent, yet important influence, and the latter being an artist I’ve been a fan of since the early 2000s.
Using sounds I created from databending techniques in my piece has got me thinking about it again. I think I’m going to continue feeding my machines corrupt sysex data to see what happens. The Nord Lead corrupt data was surprisingly glitchy without crashing the synth, and I’m well aware that my other gear is probably not as flexible in terms of handling such data. We’ll see though..
A nice video I found while looking for inspiration for 2.2:
It doesn’t apply to what I did for the assignment, and I didn’t reference it in my text, but I think it’s important to save it here.
I got a new computer, just in case my iMac completely dies mid-edit. Switching to a PC is quite a contrast, but its modular/upgradeable nature is reassuring me a bit. Plus, it is absolutely lightning fast when scrubbing through videos in both Premiere and Reaper, so that’s going to help a lot with my future projects.
Speaking of future projects, I had a few emails from potential collaborators during the week. I’ve said yes to two so far:
- A music piece and sound mixing for a ~4-minute animation about a fisherman’s psychedelic experience, and
- A one minute music piece synchronised to a projection mapped installation about overwhelming positive emotions.
I’m pretty excited about both, really. The first is an excuse to get super aquatic and possibly a little experimental, with potential for some heavy synchresis. The second, being an installation, is something I’ve been wanting to do for years; there’s also potential for us to inspire each other, too, which I’m very excited about. I’ve already started creating a very loose sketch for the music:
It will likely end up changing drastically, but it’s good to have the motivation to get started super quickly. I’m a little concerned about a one-minute piece of music getting annoying if it repeats constantly, so I’ve suggested the idea of creating several iterations of the music to accompany the same visuals, so it repeats every 5–10 minutes instead. I don’t think it’d be too much work; it’s mostly about focusing on a different element in the piece to build upon. If I create enough layers it could be a good way to stretch out a bit.